1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to a seeking method for Windows Media Audio stream, and more particularly, to a block-based seeking method for Windows Media Audio stream.
2. Description of Related Art
Windows Media Audio (WMA) is a proprietary compressed audio file format developed by Microsoft and is a default audio file format supported by Windows Media Player (WMP). WMA is also popularly implemented on portable electronic devices, such as personal digital assistants (PDA), mobile phones and digital audio players. However, due to resource limitations, it is desirable to utilize specific hardware and software to improve the efficiency of the resource-limited portable device in order to support the WMA format file. For example, utilizing a generalized dual-processor (GDP) system or a multi-processor (MP) system is advantageous. The multi-processor system has a plurality of processors communicating with each other to separately deal with control commands and data processing.
WMA seeking approach is the querying and modifying of the current position within a WMA stream. There are some basic shortcomings to the conventional WMA seeking approach implemented in a multi-processor system. The first problem is that the communication between the processors is complicated. The second problem is that the system cannot handle seeking event while a packet of the WMA stream is being decoded.
Conventional seeking method for WMA stream implemented in portable devices is stream-based, i.e., the basic unit of data to process is bytes. How to provide a block-based seeking method for WMA stream in order to efficiently and conveniently implemented in a multi-processor system is an issue of great consequence.